Texas: Cotton, Cattle, and Railroads

The United States was expanding, both in territory as well as through the economy. The annexation of Texas, the US-Mexican War it caused, and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ceded Mexican lands from the Rio Grande to the California coast as part of the Mexican Cession opened up millions of acres to various economic activities. In Texas, most of the expanding economic activity was due to either the cotton industry (Slaveholding plantations) or the cattle industry.

Growth of Cotton Industry and Commercial Farming

Cotton was first grown in Texas by Spanish missionaries. A report of the missions at San Antonio in 1745 indicates that several thousand pounds of cotton were produced annually, then spun and woven by mission craftsmen. Cotton cultivation was begun by Anglo-American colonists in 1821 and heavily featured the use of slave labor, as it had since Stephen F Austin and other Anglos settled the area. Between 1849 and 1852 the cotton production of the state increased from 58,073 bales (500 pounds each) to 431,645 bales. This sharp rise in production in the late 1850s and early 1860s was due at least in part to the removal of Indians, which opened up new areas for cotton production while the cotton gin allowed these more areas to be cultivated by fewer people. The Civil War caused a decrease in production, but by 1869 the cotton crop was reported as 350,628 bales. The introduction of barbed wire in the 1870s and the building of railroads further stimulated the industry. In 1879 some 2,178,435 acres produced 805,284 bales. The 1889 census reported 3,934,525 acres producing 1.5 million bales. The cotton crop in 1900 was more than 3.5 million bales from 7,178,915 acres.

Additional factors contributed to the increase in cotton production during the last years of the nineteenth century. A specially designed, steel-tipped plow made it possible to break up the thick black sod, and the fertile prairie soil produced as much as one bale per acre in some areas.

Beginning in 1872, thousands of immigrants from the Deep South and from Europe poured into the Blackland Prairie of Central Texas and began growing cotton. Some of the newcomers bought small farmsteads, but most worked as tenant farmers or sharecroppers for landowners who controlled spreads as large as 6,000 acres. This socially enforced debt peonage, known as the crop-lien system, began after the Civil War and continued in practice until the 1930s.

Ranching and the Cattle Industry: From Open Range to Animal Farms

Somewhere in Mexico in the 1500s, cattle from Spanish vaqueros' fed a growing Texas population. They had longer horns than most cattle, often spanning six feet, and were lean bordering on bony. As they wandered across the frontier, they met sturdy, speckled-coated British-bred cattle moving west from the eastern U.S coasts. Nature took its course, and by the 1800s, a new breed of strong, hardy, disease-resistant Longhorn cattle roamed the Texas by the millions. Open-range ranching was the difficult job of driving (escorting) hundreds, sometimes thousands of cows from ranches in Texas to railroad terminals in the western territories.

Longhorn beef sold for about $1.50 per head in overstocked Texas, but in the burgeoning cities on the east and west coasts, the coveted meat went for $30.00 to $40.00 per head. Texas ranchers could make huge profits by moving their herds north on the now-famous cattle trails that stretched from far south Texas to the Kansas and Missouri stockyards and railroad towns.

In the 1860s, cattle ranchers in Texas faced difficulties getting their longhorn cattle to market. Kansas homesteaders objected to the cattle crossing their land because the cattle might carry ticks which could spread a disease called Texas Fever (or Spanish Fever) fatal to some types of cattle. The disease could make a Longhorn sick, but they were hardier stock than the northern cattle and Longhorns seldom died from the disease. A man named Joseph McCoy expected that the railroads companies were interested in expanding their freight operations and he saw this as a good business opportunity. McCoy built a hotel, stockyard, office and bank in a little village along the Kansas Pacific Railway (currently the Union Pacific). This village became known as Abilene, Kansas - one of the first cow towns. McCoy's plan was for cattle to be driven to Abilene from Texas and taken from there by rail to bigger cities in The Midwest and the East.

Abilene sat near the end of the Chisholm Trail (named after Jesse Chisholm) established during the American Civil War for supplying the Confederate army. This trail ran to the west of the settled portion of Kansas, making it possible to use the trail without creating hostility from the Kansas homesteaders.

From the 1860s to the late 1880s, cowboys herded over ten million cattle to market on the controlled chaos of a trail drive. Ranchers and cowboys had to contend with the elements as well as hostile Native Americans trying to protect their land from the world's newest imperial nation. Hard to believe that all that legendary Texas cattle history happened in a mere 20 years.

The ranch’s African American and white cowboys as well as Hispanic vaqueros spent their days checking and mending fences, branding new cattle, and moving herds in search of water. Nights were often spent patrolling the land for cattle rustlers and wolves. When the annual cattle drives began, life got even harder. Despite what you see in the movies, about 60% of all cowboys were Mexican or black (Haeber, 2003 and Ponsford, 2012).

During the close of the 19th century, many small-scale ranchers lost their dreams and their shirts as hard times and inevitable change rolled through the Texas frontier. Barbed wire fences broke up the grazing lands and effectively ended open-range ranching.

Trail drives became obsolete as railroad cars trundled cattle from Texas to big city markets on both coasts. Droughts, blizzards, fires, and predators wiped out herds across the state. Prices for beef plunged when Texas longhorns were quarantined as carriers of tick fever. The times had changed. Many ranchers and cowboys alike sized up the new reality of the cattle kingdom. Then they knocked the trail dust from their boots, hung up their ropes, and rode off the range into new lives elsewhere.

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